Culture War – Will It Work

Hard to grow a campaign on Democratic failures to reignite the economy or not contain the pandemic when the opposite is true. With powerful demands from its most essential “base” constituency – pushing against even modest gun control, encouraging voting, addressing climate change as storms, wildfires, droughts and coastal erosion pound our nation, taxes on the super-mega-rich or sustaining a many-decade Roe vs Wade ruling – even in contravention of a clear popular majority set of opinions, the GOP has been forced to mount more abstract policies. The mantra is based on the purported destruction of the moral core of America by what is labeled the “radical left” determined to “impose socialism” on a free market, that Donald Trump is and will be reinstated as President by August, and that our election process has been fraudulently coopted by Democrats.

Can the GOP, now a radical right Trump-led coalition, mount a vigorous “culture war” to maximize its historical mid-term likelihood of recapturing both houses of Congress by ignoring the political axiom, “It’s the economy, stupid”? Can they rouse an a once-latent emotional reaction, heavily mired in a white supremacist tradition, to guarantee success? Can they twist New Testament teachings of tolerance to match the intolerant requirements of too many evangelicals in their base? Will the addition of the greatest legislative movement to suppress minority voting since Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era add an extra measure of assurance? If this effort is indeed successful, we all should to know that the American vision of democracy – majority determination but with full protection for minorities – will at best be suspended and at worst be permanently over. In short, can the electorate effectively vote to end democracy?

We know references to “creeping socialism” misuse that phrase. Users conflate socialism – where the government itself owns the nation’s manufacturing, business and real estate… wealth – with social programs, just because the same root word is common to both concepts. Public schools and Social Security, for example, are social programs. 

We listen to a Harvard-educated Senator, Ted Cruz, equate honest and fact-based teaching of historical racial injustice as simply another expression of Marxism, a political philosophy predicated on “class” warfare, an economic battle. He tells us that all we need to do in evaluating the growing sentiment against so-called “critical race theory” is to substitute the word “class” for “race,” and the comparison is complete. Seriously, when the essence of Marxism is “class” – the very center of that perception? Not race? That’s like looking at a sentence and replacing “good” with “bad” and determining that the revised sentence says the same thing!!!

This Republican intrusion into which facts are permitted in public classrooms probably will be reversed by our judicial system, but hope rings loud that the new conservative Supreme Court will leave these new statutes, adopted or being proposed in dozens of states, intact. The “cancel culture” movement rails at the thought of removing tributes to slave owners and those who fought to preserve slavery, clearly offensive to African Americans whose ancestry was chained, traded, tortured and murdered as subhuman property.

Reports surfacing from the Trump era Department of Justice show that the President demanded that the DOJ and the FCC proceed against late night hosts, Saturday Night Live, and their networks, for their disrespectful and comedic depiction of Mr. Trump. Of course, each such federal agency was acutely aware that such efforts would not stand a chance against the plain meaning of the First Amendment. Yet the DOJ was still willing to pursue the tapping into private communications of Democratic congressional representatives and journalist-critics at Trump’s whim. That “repress opposing speech” sentiment is hardly dead. The above efforts to “stop cancel culture,” to reverse election results and to impose a ban on presented fully documented historical facts of racial injustice are bad enough. But Trump-successor-wannabe, Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis, just signed a new level of political intimation of free speech into law.

Writing for the June 23rd, Salon.com, columnist Brett Bachman explains this statute:“Public universities in Florida will be required to survey both faculty and students on their political beliefs and viewpoints, with the institutions at risk of losing their funding if the responses are not satisfactory to the state's Republican-led legislature. 

“The unprecedented project, which was tucked into a law signed Tuesday by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, is part of a long-running, nationwide right-wing push to promote ‘intellectual diversity’ on campuses — though worries over a lack of details on the survey's privacy protections, and questions over what the results may ultimately be used for, hover over the venture.

“Based on the bill's language, survey responses will not necessarily be anonymous — sparking worries among many professors and other university staff that they may be targeted, held back in their careers or even fired for their beliefs. 

“According to the bill's sponsor, state Sen. Ray Rodrigues, faculty will not be promoted or fired based on their responses, but, as The Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday [6/22], the bill itself does not back up those claims.” All of these efforts seem to make a mockery of our claim, as stated in the last phrase in our national anthem, that America is the “Land of the free and the home of the brave.” A determined minority, by any and all means possible, is determined to take unilateral control of this nation at the expense of the majority of Americans and particularly those minorities seeking to capture the justice promised to them by the U.S. Constitution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if there remains a majority belief in the American system of democracy, as flawed as it is, “we the people” must commit ourselves to root out these efforts to usurp the very constitutional principles upon which our government is based.